The invention concerns a method to provide additional information using a program, loaded on a computer, to reproduce information. The invention moreover concerns a computer comprising such a program to reproduce information.
Documents, in particular documents which are provided for an expert circle of readers, frequently contain technical terms and subject-specific abbreviations. These technical terms and subject-specific abbreviations frequently cause an inexperienced or non-expert reader of the document difficulties in completely comprehending the content or statement of the document, since additional information connected with the technical terms or the subject-specific abbreviations remains hidden to him.
For documents which exist in file form and can be displayed on a computer using a text processing program (such as Microsoft Word™), it is known, for example, to provide a spelling aid which checks every word of a document for the correct spelling and, if necessary, gives suggestions for improvement. Furthermore, databank-based thesauruses exist which can offer one or more words for each individual word of a document which have the same or a similar meaning as the individual word. Moreover, it is known to provide individual words or sequences of documents existing in file form (for example, in “interactive books”) with hyperlinks in order to be able to access data which, for example, are present on the same data medium as the document itself, or in order to refer to data on the Internet.
However, none of these known methods solves the problem indicated previously: to make an arbitrary document comprising technical terms and subject-specific abbreviations and present in file form more intelligible for an non-expert reader via the provision of additional information.